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"The only checks on Federal power left for the American people are their own commitment to live in liberty and the election of those who share a fervent embrace of the principles put forward as “self evident truths” in the Declaration of Independence whose 226th birthday we celebrate on July 4th."(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people. John F. Kennedy.

Last week, the governing elite won their fight to subjugate the American people through the political intimidation of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

In its 5-4 decision, the Court ruled the federal government does not have the authority under the Constitution to compel the purchase of a product or service under the Commerce Clause. As the four dissenting judges made clear, that should have been the end of the law. But no, Chief Justice John Roberts went on to rewrite the law from the bench, declaring what Congress had explicitly rejected, and the President of the United States had on more than one occasion insisted was not the case, that the penalty for not purchasing insurance was, in fact, a “tax.”

By so doing, he demonstrated yet again the Supreme Court cannot be relied upon to protect the liberties of the American people the Constitution was written to secure.

The only checks on Federal power left for the American people are their own commitment to live in liberty and the election of those who share a fervent embrace of the principles put forward as “self evident truths” in the Declaration of Independence whose 226th birthday we celebrate on July 4th:

That all Men are created equal,

That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,

That among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness –

That to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Make no mistake, from the beginning of their movement in the late 1800s to today, Progressives, including President Barack Obama, have opposed these principles as the basis for our system or government.

You think that statement can’t be true?

Here is but one example of the desire by the Progressives to set aside the principles of the Declaration. In his 1887 essay, “Socialism and Democracy,” future President Woodrow Wilson explicitly rejected the idea of unalienable natural rights, and asserted rights are a positive grant from those in power. Channeling the arguments used 30-years before to defend the right of the majority to impose and perpetuate the institution of slavery, he wrote:

For it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.(Emphasis added.) Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.

Echoing and drawing inspiration of these Progressive oracles of the past, President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union Speech used the success of our military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as the source of his vision of the ideal relationship between government and the American people:

These (military) achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.